Casualties of China’s Transformed Economy

Tie Xi Qu: West of Tracks

Chinese factories featured in the documentary "West of the Tracks."Credit
Ad Vitam & Wang Bing

Bracketed by stunning long shots taken from the front of a moving freight train, Wang Bing’s epic, three-part documentary, “Tie Xi Qu: West of Tracks,” is an astonishingly intimate record of China’s painful transition from state-run industry to a free market. Filming between 1999 and 2001, Mr. Wang and his sound engineer, Lin Xudong, painstakingly document the death throes of the Tie Xi industrial district in the city of Shenyang, in northeast China, a once-vibrant symbol of a thriving socialist economy. As factories close and workers lose not only their jobs but also their homes and social networks, the filmmakers patiently observe the end of an era and the fortitude of those left floundering in its wake.

In Part 1, “Rust,” we enter the decaying, state-owned factories where the few remaining workers toil in an inferno of smelting furnaces and particulate matter so dense they can barely see. Some are receiving medical treatment for lead poisoning, and most have not been paid in months. Using only natural sound and a fly-on-the-wall camera, Mr. Wang listens to their break-room worries about impending layoffs and disappearing pensions, catching the smoke from their cigarettes as it mingles with furnace gases and countless unidentifiable emissions. Filled with obsolete equipment and stagnating pools of toxic waste, these hazardous spaces of the factory floor project a forlorn beauty as poignant as the lives they shelter.

For the second segment, “Remnants,” the film moves to the cheerily named neighborhood of Rainbow Row to observe a group of teenagers and their families as they cope with imminent displacement. Scheduled for demolition, their factory-owned community of dilapidated shacks and rundown markets will be gone in a few months, and government compensation and relocation are uncertain. As walls crumble around them and utilities are cut off, a valiant few cling to the only home they have ever known, “remnants” in the eyes of a system that no longer needs them.

Narrowing his focus from a stricken community to one small family, Mr. Wang uses his third and most heartbreaking segment, “Rails,” to tell the story of Du Xiyun and his teenage son Du Yang. Unemployed scavengers whose survival depends on the old freight railway that transports raw materials to the factories, One-Eyed Du, as he’s affectionately called by the railway workers, steals scraps of coal and anything else he can sell. “I have connections,” he asserts pitifully, explaining how until now he has avoided jail — a streak of luck that will finally run out and precipitate the film’s most devastatingly raw sequence. “There aren’t many people who’d be willing to live the way we do,” he says matter of factly, and it’s hard to disagree.

Capturing moments both large and small — a blast-furnace “mishap,” a plaintive song on the radio asking “Baby, aren’t you tired of this yet?” — this profoundly empathetic and humanist work bears witness to a vanished way of life and the real cost of progress. “Get this place on film now, because it won’t be around much longer,” advises one of Mr. Wang’s stoic factory workers. Luckily for us, he did.

TIE XI QU: WEST OF TRACKS

Opens today in Manhattan.

Written (in Mandarin, with English subtitles) and directed by Wang Bing; director of photography, Mr. Wang; edited by Mr. Wang and Adam Kerby; sound engineer, Lin Xudong; produced by Zhu Zhu; released by Ad Vitam Distribution. At the Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, at Second Street, East Village. Running time for Part 1, “Rust”: 240 minutes. Running time for Part 2, “Remnants”: 175 minutes. Running time for Part 3, “Rails”: 130 minutes. This film is not rated.

Tie Xi Qu: West of Tracks

NYT Critic’s Pick

DirectorBing Wang

GenreDocumentary

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Last updated: Nov 2, 2017

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page E5 of the New York edition with the headline: Casualties Of China’s Transformed Economy. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe